Small claims court does get a company's attention. They either have to show up or lose. Not that showing up means a win.
I'm surprised that someone had trouble serving a subpoena on Facebook.
Looking up "Meta" in California Corporation Search brings up everything with "Metal" in it, which is a hassle. Their actual company name is "Meta Platforms, Incorporated". Search for "Meta Platforms" here.[1] California company registration #2711108.
Subpoenas are sent, using a process server, to their registered agent,
which is Corporation Service Company in Sacramento, a business which exists to receive subpoenas for other companies. And, conveniently, there are process serving companies with offices in the same building, and you can find them by searching for the address of CSC and "process server", then ignoring the spam results.
Most small claims court web sites explain all this.
To me this appears as a way to outsource customer service to an external entity funded by a cash flow to which Meta does not need to contribute. The courts are always going to exist, Meta is always paying its lawyers, so why bother hiring extra people to staff a support line?
And by making support have to go through the legal system you've already cut out 90% of the support calls you would normally take.
Financially, the entire arrangement is a huge win and cost saving for Meta while at the same time completely overwhelming the publicly funded small claims court. This is not dissimilar to how many Walmart employees require government Aid because Walmart won't pay them enough do not require it.
The economy will continue to improve the more this leeching can be minimised and ultimately eliminated. Interest rates have effectively forced Silicon Valley VC to stop funding more leeches, but society is still left with some truly gigantic ones to deal with; they have embedded themselves into the system. Their removal will take time, and patience. Lots of work to do.
But are they actually doing that? In this case people are using it for that, but I could also use small claims court to get the attention of a plumber who won't send me a quote. That doesn't mean that plumber is outsourcing to small claims court.
This is really confident nonsense. Taxes are very much involved with gains and losses, whether they’re direct costs or things like depreciating assets, companies extract a great deal of tax value off of their losses. Entire industries are built upon the very notion that with a little engineered accounting of strategic losses, companies can get away with paying egregiously little in taxes. On the other side of that, they also extract value from tax dollars with things like nutritional assistance, Medicaid, financial aid, and other means-tested social programs that contribute towards the social safety gap that their poor compensation of hourly employees is partly responsible for.
I’m not sure why, but your comments about this seem to be very contrarian, to the point of obtuse in places. Even if the framing device isn’t 100% literally consistent, the cause/effect it’s describing should be pretty clear from context. Some of the present rhetoric surrounding this kind of thing have been exaggerated or misrepresented, for example that stores that collect donations from rounding up customers’ totals are then using those donations for tax write-offs (they aren’t, it’s yours to write off).
But the problem of the working poor in the United States receiving significant amounts of government assistance while their employers lobby for right-to-work labor laws and fight union efforts and minimum wage increases is a longstanding and well documented situation. Couple that with the deference given to their interests at every level and branch of government, as well as the grossly disproportionate distribution of wealth, and it’s a glaring symptom of a larger, deep-seated disease that is horribly corrosive to the fabric of a productive, free society.
I can't imagine the circumstances under which a plumber would be compelled to send you a quote. Your analogy makes no sense. What legal theory are you thinking of there?
It's because if meta mistakenly gives the wrong account to the wrong person, the potential losses are huge.
Whereas if a judge gives the account to the wrong person, meta isn't liable.
There is nothing else they can do when someone set up their Facebook account 15 years ago and has lost their email address and phone number from back then.
The article says that small claim court has $100 filing fees - considering that every case is heard for 10 minutes, it sounds like small claim court should be able to mostly if not completely self-fund.
At the scale of these tech companies and the number of customer service issues the courts would be overrun and this hurts the other cases. Courts can’t scale, even at $100 per small claims case filing fee they are losing money, Courts aren’t meant to be profitable businesses nor even self sustaining, they provide a public function and service paid for by tax dollars.
> overwhelming the publicly funded small claims court
I'm guessing there's no court fees that the losing party has to pay? It would seem fair to tell the troublemaker to pay for the judge's and other court employees hours...
Court costs are HEAVILY subsidized by the government that has jurisdiction over them. I would guess nobody is paying more than around $400 to sue Meta in Small Claims, and if the case drags on for months or years with continuances and (if the court allows it) discovery, then it is going to burn a ton of time from the various court staff, building upkeep, web site maintenance and all the other things that keep the courts running.
I've had Small Claims cases that have run to thousands of hours of court time over multiple years.
If you read the article, the second paragraph tells about someone whose costs were $700 (significantly more than $400), and even explains why they were so high: the need to travel to California to appear in person.
Even though it's much more expensive to lose a lawsuit over an issue than it is to resolve it through customer service, most people choose not to sue. Facebook can fulfill all of their current legal requirements by simply not showing up to any court hearings, losing by default, and paying whatever someone won. If that is cheaper than providing real customer service, they will do it. And real lawyers cost $100s/hour so if the amount FB has to pay is less than that they're losing money by showing up!
This applies to all companies, but the average Facebook user doesn't even pay for an account and are of even less value than a typical customer support line user (notably, the article says a benefit of "Facebook verified" which costs $15/month is actual support).
Is the arbitrage opportunity worth it? It doesn't seem like it is considering the limiting factor being the court system, and you can't really arbitrage off cheaply off miniscule enough violations to profit more than a few one off cases. Damages must also be present, so maybe a service to service offering where one party disparages you online and then you take Meta to court for not suspending that party would work, but thats fraud, and if found out you risk quite a bit for sums that seem to not really exceed more than $15,000 across the US (from the article).
You're saying that spending thousands of dollars in court settlements and man-hours for each of these cases is somehow advantageous to Meta?? That they want to be sued?
If they bothered to appeal, I expect Meta would win most of these cases. As long as there are very few of them, it's not worth the cost. Trying to twist the situation to seem like this is somehow a good thing for Meta is well... twisted.
Also, as someone else pointed out already, Meta pays taxes which pay for those courts. The guy flying in from New Jersey does not.
They would contract this work and pay a few hundred an hour. Internal counsel would not be cheaper since they staff based on the demand. None of this is free, it’s just less costly than customer service.
If they could handle it using minimal automation, they would. They can't, so they don't.
Figuring out which real human owns an account that was never verified to belong to that human in the first place is not easy to automate, if possible at all. It's expensive, error-prone, and time-consuming. And if not done carefully, it makes it far easier to steal accounts than it already is.
I understand that many commenters have magic wands. Unfortunately, Meta does not.
Wtf? No. This is just the legal system in operation, if it were by facebook they would not offer this type of users, they have to be ordered to by the judicial system.
There is no deliberate decision to do this at the judicial level, there is only a decision not to willingly do it at all.
No company has (nor should have) any mandate to "customer service" beyond what the market demands. Dispute resolution is what courts are for. Meta already pays taxes that fund courts.
If courts are unable to keep up with demand generated by the modern digital economy, let's fix that. Making losers pay court fees would go a very long way towards solving the problem.
Re: Walmart, the other option is to just cut the aid. People won't work if they are not able to sustain themselves (calorically) on the pay. The best way to avoid these antipatterns is to stop enabling them.
There is another solution to this problem: reputation. There inevitably will emerge a spectrum of reputability among eg. used car salesman. It is your responsibility to manage your risk in regards to the reputation of the person you are transacting with, attend to the specifics of your deal, and to do your due diligence. So much is obvious in the world of business.
Also, in a world of prompt dispute resolution by efficient courts, with losers paying fees, shady businessmen who repeatedly violate contracts will quickly find themselves out of business. The problem we have is that our courts work on an 1800s timescale. We can fix this.
Re: social media, standards are already emerging. For instance the much contested device attestation standard attempts to fix exactly this problem. It'll work itself out in a decade or two, no intervention required.
> one of the roles of government regulation that can create a net economic gain
I disagree in principle. The role of the government of a free society is to create a nonviolent liberal ecosystem. Not to interfere in the outcomes that ecosystem produces.
I half-agree with the above, which is that loser-pays is a good system and it's necessary to stop enabling companies.
The problem with your theory is that market forces incentivize firms to take action that reduce everyone's profits/benefits so long as the action is individually profitable for the company. Which is why there are "lemon laws" on selling used cars or food regulations.
The used car industry as a whole benefits when consumers are willing to pay more. Customers are willing to pay more for a used car if they think it will be high-quality. However, an ethically questionable used car salesman will try to undercut each other by offering low-quality cars that immediately break, giving all used car salesmen a bad name. Consumers now no longer want to buy used cars at all and now the only people making money are those selling a bad product.
The point of legal regulation here is to enforce a quality minimum on used cars. This drives the price of used cars upwards. Salespeople get paid more, the customers get better quality, and the world is better off having reused cars that would've been scrapped. Everyone is better off.
This could also be true for social media. Forcing social media to invest in better systems to ban users means that social media advertising can be worth more money. Right now, advertising marketplaces are controlled by the companies themselves. Nobody trusts companies to show ads to real users instead of bots. This drives the value of social media advertising down.
While individually, it doesn't make sense to pay for customer service infrastructure to verify people's ownership of accounts, if there is a mandatory standard, all social media companies would benefit because it increases the value of their products.
This is one of the roles of government regulation that can create a net economic gain.
Sidenote: car sales in general are not ethical. When you go to the dealer & talk to a salesperson, and subsequently talk to the $ guy, you will be required to sign a piece of paper stating that you cannot derive ANY claims on what the salesperson told you, except those written down on that form. And that form is empty.
Also, I wish there was a nationwide requirement for warranty. Not that I have a problem with selling as-is per se, but it incentivizes used car dealers to take in every vehicle they can on trade, erase the codes, and try to sell it. Again, they can lie to your face about how well this car was maintained, how it was taken care off, etc, and you cannot derive ANY value off those quotes.
I find it insane that in 2024 I cannot get a print-out of a car on how well it was maintained, and how many times it was floored on a cold engine.
That said, this economic paper is pretty legendary at this point: <<The Market for Lemons>>
Summary: <<Akerlof's paper uses the market for used cars as an example of the problem of quality uncertainty. It concludes that owners of high-quality used cars will not place their cars on the used car market. A car buyer should only be able to buy low-quality used cars, and will pay accordingly as the market for good used cars does not exist.>>
The Market for Lemons is legendary only as an example of economists ignoring reality to pursue their pet theories. Reality is closer to that explained in Mediations on Moloch.
The theory that the removal of lemon laws would result in a more informed consumer base has no basis in reality--economists need to spend less time theorizing about how economies work and start looking at actual economies to figure out how they work. We had decades of consumers not becoming informed enough to differentiate between a peach and a lemon before lemon laws existed. That's decades of proof that The Market for Lemons is wrong. That should have been caught in peer review, and that should have prevented the paper from being published. The fact that this absurd paper won a Nobel Prize should call into question the validity of the prevailing ideas of the entire field of economics, at least at that time.
The market for cars of uncertain quality will always have a floor on the price because people don't have a choice except to take a risk on buying a car of uncertain quality in an economy where the car industry has successfully dismantled public transportation infrastructure. Given this inelastic demand, dealers can leverage consumer ignorance to sell lemons as if they were peaches, and the consumer suffers. Hoping consumers will educate themselves is a solution that doesn't scale; it is unrealistic to expect consumers to become experts on cars, computers, phones, medical devices, and every other complex product just so they can avoid being sold inferior, broken products. It is clear that the only solution that works is for experts on products, i.e. the sellers, be held accountable when they knowingly sell low quality products as if they were high quality.
> The theory that the removal of lemon laws would result in a more informed consumer base has no basis in reality.
That's not what the paper says. It proposes government intervention and predates many lemon laws.
> Hoping consumers will educate themselves is a solution that doesn't scale; it is unrealistic to expect consumers to become experts on cars, computers, phones, medical devices, and every other complex product just so they can avoid being sold inferior, broken products.
This is the core claim of the original paper. When buyers have information asymmetry relative to sellers, they suffer.
> It is clear that the only solution that works is for experts on products, i.e. the sellers, be held accountable when they knowingly sell low quality products as if they were high quality.
This is literally what a lemon law is and what you're saying is on page 1 of the Market for Lemons paper.
> There are many markets in which buyers use some market
statistic to judge the quality of prospective purchases. In this case
there is incentive for sellers to market poor quality merchandise,
since the returns for good quality accrue mainly to the entire group
whose statistic is affected rather than to the individual seller. As
a result there tends to be a reduction in the average quality of goods
and also in the size of the market. It should also be perceived that
in these markets social and private returns differ, and therefore, in
some cases, governmental intervention may increase the welfare of
all parties
> "I find it insane that in 2024 I cannot get a print-out of a car on how well it was maintained, and how many times it was floored on a cold engine."
In the UK every car has a registration document with the previous owner's name and address on it. You can assume a lot regarding whether you want to still buy the car based purely on this information. It's surprising how many people overlook this simple step and rely upon warranties and such which are,often, not worth the paper they are printed on.
Aren’t there obd2 readers that will dump this information?
And if the representations form is empty why don’t you just write down all the things the dealer told you and then offer to buy the car? At least you’d know which sellers are knowingly lying to you.
> While individually, it doesn't make sense to pay for customer service infrastructure to verify people's ownership of accounts, if there is a mandatory standard, all social media companies would benefit because it increases the value of their products.
I am not sure this is a good idea in the US where even voter ids are controversial.
Yes! We just need better, more effective, more efficient courts, more capable of coping with the demand generated by an increasingly interconnected economy. Lemon laws are just a hack to paper over the side effects without addressing the root cause.
Edit: I see a world where small claims can be adjudicated online, not terribly differently from how lots of customer service works, with the added advantage of an impartial mediator and a clear process of appeal.
Interesting. I think I would prefer a world where companies would do right by their customers and there be no need to take them to court, but if it was indeed accessible online then hey maybe it wouldn't be so bad.
Either idea seems like starry eyed optimism, I'm afraid.
I'm really annoyed everytime I go to buy groceries and I can't find any bread cut with alum and plaster of Paris, or sweets coloured with lead.
Actually, I'm not. To think that everything should be mediated by markets is just typical libertarian capitalism nonsense.
Reputation doesn't scale. Fixing problems with the court with much more expensive that preventing them from happening in the first place. Information and power asymmetries are real.
> Re: Walmart, the other option is to just cut the aid. People won't work if they are not able to sustain themselves (calorically) on the pay. The best way to avoid these antipatterns is to stop enabling them.
This is a truly horrifying, compassionless comment. You're literally suggesting starving people.
Sure, cutting these programs means eventually Walmart changes their business model. But the people who suffer during that transition aren't Walmart shareholders, who experience what, a temporary 30% loss in their share price? The people who suffer are the workers; Walmart has replaced thousands of smaller local stores which used to provide jobs, so the workers cannot necessarily find other work.
Walmart has plenty of runway to play a game of chicken here: oh, you want to cut aid? Let's see if that idea lasts one or two election cycles. In the mean time workers, as you say, are "unable to sustain themselves (calorically)", i.e. starving, because their options are either continue working for Walmart for not enough pay to eat, or quit, and get no pay to eat.
I mean, I agree this would cause a mass quitting at Walmart and the hundreds of other companies that employ the same strategies, but where do those workers start working? Companies as a whole can just afford to refuse to raise pay for a while in most cases and try other business models in the meantime. Even if other companies are started which outcompete Walmart by paying their workers a living wage, it will take decades for those companies to grow to the same size and provide as many jobs.
We don't have to make these changes all at once. I agree doing so would be somewhat disruptive. We can roll back the aid over a period of say 5 or 10 years, giving workers (and companies) time to figure out what to do.
I agree it may not be tenable in a representative democracy, but my point is that means the democracy is too powerful and encroaches on fundamental liberty. Government should not have the power to redistribute assets in pursuit of the "general welfare", and indeed it did not until US v. Butler (1936) gave the government sweeping power to do basically anything.
> We don't have to make these changes all at once. I agree doing so would be somewhat disruptive. We can roll back the aid over a period of say 5 or 10 years, giving workers (and companies) time to figure out what to do.
We don't need to give companies time to figure out what to do. We already know their solution, because it's the same playbook they've always used: change no business practices, and spend a fraction of that cost on lobbying (bribes) and propagandizing for the change to be reversed. A tiered rollout just gives them more runway to do this. And more time when workers suffer.
Instead of trying to predict what will happen based on your ivory tower economic theory, try predicting what will happen based on what has happened, i.e., reality.
Your opinion continues to be a horrifying, compassionless take: you openly admit it would "be somewhat disruptive", but the suffering of workers is a sacrifice you are willing to make for your pet ideology.
More to the point: why would we even want to give companies time to figure out what to do? They have had plenty of time to do the right thing and they chose to do the wrong thing. I'm not for punitive justice, but I'm also not particularly concerned if the solution to the problem harms those who knowingly and intentionally caused the problem.
> I agree it may not be tenable in a representative democracy, but my point is that means the democracy is too powerful and encroaches on fundamental liberty. Government should not have the power to redistribute assets in pursuit of the "general welfare", and indeed it did not until US v. Butler (1936) gave the government sweeping power to do basically anything.
Fundamental liberty applies to humans, not corporations. Corporations do not have fundamental rights, period. And just as fundamentally, when government does not limit the power of corporations, corporations step into the power void, gain too much power, and take away people's rights and liberties. Being for corporate liberty is being against human liberty, it's as simple as that.
Yes, I understand that the SCOTUS ruled that corporations are people: the SCOTUS is wrong.
Yes, I understand that corporations are made up of people. But the actions of corporations are chosen by a small, small fraction of those people, and benefit that same small fraction of people. That small fraction of people disproportionately get to exercise any rights that are granted to a corporation, often at the expense of many more people lower in the corporate pyramid. Granting freedoms to corporations is effectively the pigs in Animal Farm saying "you're all free, but some of you are freer than others" because you're granting those rights to the decision makers in the corporation and not to the workers.
My argument isn't that corporations are people. My point is that the government should never have been given the power to redistribute wealth the way it does today. It has not always had this power. And had the constitution been slightly clearer, it would not have this power today. No amount of lobbying would change that.
I am looking at reality, namely the reality of the US before the aforementioned decision giving the government broad power over the "general welfare". Society more resembled a liberal ecosystem. People were individually responsible to negotiate for their own prosperity.
It is my fundamental liberty that is being violated by forcing me to contribute to the maintenance of strangers. I would like the freedom to opt out of this mandatory insurance scheme.
It's not compassionate to force your view of compassion on others. It's tyrannical. In the vein of "If you're against gay marriage, don't get gay married": if you want to help people, contribute to charity. Don't force your views on others.
> And had the constitution been slightly clearer, it would not have this power today.
When you say the government it seems like either you’re forgetting about the states, or you are not giving the tenth amendment sufficient weight in your calculation. Or something else?
I'm not! The nice thing about states is there are so many of them, and it's pretty easy to move state. Also as an American you have a right to live in any state you choose. None of these things are true at the national level.
I'm all for states experimenting with socialism or any other policy (eg. abortion rights), since these experiments are relatively safe (people can and will just relocate) and cheap (changing policy is easier on a small scale). That's the beauty of the American (eco)system. Government is fundamentally a local concern. What I am vehemently against is the federal government having any sort of broad authority in this regard.
> My point is that the government should never have been given the power to redistribute wealth the way it does today. It has not always had this power. And had the constitution been slightly clearer, it would not have this power today. No amount of lobbying would change that.
Half the founding fathers owned slaves, and all of them agreed to count humans as 3/5 of humans in order to grant slave states 5/3 the representation of non-slave states. I'm not particularly concerned with their intentions, and I also find it strange that you'd look to them as some sort of beacons of liberty.
I read your comment about wanting states to have more power and I agree with that, but that's not the reality we live in. If we're looking at policies that are a way forward, realistic support for the poor is going to have to come from states first before we remove federal support. Meanwhile, it seems you're just fine with letting poor people starve to death, so maybe state's rights isn't your opinion that's most concerning at the moment.
> It is my fundamental liberty that is being violated by forcing me to contribute to the maintenance of strangers. I would like the freedom to opt out of this mandatory insurance scheme.
Well if you don't think you benefit from society, then you lose nothing by removing yourself from society. There are plenty of right-libertarian paradises like checks notes Sudan where you can go live out your self-reliance fantasy without having to persuade the rest of us to participate. I'll welcome you back when you need old-age care and want to rely on our tyrannical medicare.
It's a bit strange that the largest forms of welfare are corporate welfare, yet people concerned about welfare redistributing wealth always seem to target redistribution to poor people. You're concerned about food programs for minimum-wage Walmart workers taking your hard-earned money when the entire SNAP program cost about $57.1 billion in 2018, while the corporate benefits to the GM corporation alone ran between $50-80 billion and we can't get a more exact number because that's not even transparent.
> It's not compassionate to force your view of compassion on others. It's tyrannical. In the vein of "If you're against gay marriage, don't get gay married": if you want to help people, contribute to charity. Don't force your views on others.
You're trying to present it as if any law that isn't unanimously agreed upon is tyranny, but that's just unavoidable--any attempt to influence the laws is enforcing your will on others. That includes your wanting to remove welfare programs. Other people want those programs, you want to enforce your will on them by removing them. Tyranny!
Tyranny is when a single person or small group of people have absolute authority. You don't get to expand that words meaning to use as a scare word for any policy you don't like. When a representative democracy chooses laws, that's just what the beacon-of-freedom constitution you like intended.
I tend to think that corporations holding people's basic needs like food and shelter ransom unless they do what the company wants is a more obvious form of tyranny than the miniscule portion of your taxes that go to feeding people.
ah yes, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"
Edit: It's an awful thing, and has failed every time it was tried, usually with unspeakable horrors inflicted on incalculable numbers of people. Many would rather die free than live in shackles, even if the shackles are of gold. Imposing involuntary obligations on people is indistinguishable from enslaving them.
"Ultra-capitalism" is just the state of nature without the violence. It is distributed rather than centralized authority. It is a liberal ecosystem in which organisms compete, succeed, and fail. Allowing people to bear the total consequences of their failure and misfortune is not immoral.
If you can't sustain yourself, the immoral and undignified thing is to impose on others. The only decent thing to do is accept their charity when freely given, not elect tyrants who will take by force.
Democracy is not an aim, it is a means to liberty. And an imperfect one at that, which I would be glad to see replaced when a better option becomes available (AI?). If the power of the government threatens the freedom of the people, the government must be replaced. So much is written in the constitution.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. Ultra-capitalism is no better than ultra-communism. They are both systems designed to reduce democracy and to funnel all the money into the hands of a small number of elites.
I prefer to live in a society where people can feed themselves, or get sick, or lose their jobs, without losing their house or going bankrupt - regardless of the ideology de jure.
I'm not sure why you didn't just reply to my comment instead of updating yours.
Anyway, your points are ridiculous on the surface. You're deliberately conflating communism with democratic center-left policies, but they are not remotely comparable.
There are plenty of places in the world - most of modern Europe, for example - which have social safety nets where "unspeakable horrors" are not being "inflicted on incalculable numbers of people".
> Imposing involuntary obligations on people is indistinguishable from enslaving them.
This is complete nonsense. All societies impose involuntary obligations. You can't just do what you want in society and get away with it. You can't deliberately hurt people, can't speed in your car, you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theatre, you can't forge your signature or deceive people into giving you money; force is largely monopolised by the state, limiting your freedoms in all sorts of different ways. You call to the constitution, the defining document of the US government, as if it doesn't impose any obligations on you. But you then say it requires you to revolt against the government.
The problem with arguments like yours is that you pick and choose what you consider to be "involuntary" obligations. I'm sure you feel that the very real involuntary obligations imposed by property law are perfectly OK with you, despite that, taken to its extreme, this literally creates a system of indentured servitude, examples of which include bankruptcy for getting sick, and lifetime loans for getting an education.
This whole liberty-or-die thing is just as corrupt. Your kind of liberty is strictly about the freedom to do whatever the hell you want, with no obligation to the liberty of others. All you care about is your "positive freedoms", the freedom to "do", but you couldn't care less about the more important freedoms: freedom from hunger, freedom from fear, freedom from homelessness, freedom from pain.
These freedoms are the most important freedoms of all; without them, true liberty is impossible.
This is relatively recent, and has proven itself quite fragile. Democracies elect dictators. Dictators of powerful governments commit atrocities. There is no "don't elect dictators" solution. The only solution is to disempower the government. Also European nations are relatively small and relatively culturally homogenous. There is no functioning liberal democracy of a large multicultural state.
> All societies impose involuntary obligations
There is a vast difference between outlawing violent behaviour and mandating cooperation. The latter is indistinguishable from slavery. Free societies don't compel the cooperation of their citizens beyond the strict minimum necessary to maintain liberty itself. Even being conscripted into the army, which is slavery, can be justified if it is to defend against a foe who would destroy liberal society.
It is however categorically not justified to mandate contribution to various insurance schemes and welfare programs. There is no picking and choosing here. I want my interactions with the state to maximize for consent[1]. I want the ability to out out. I am not owed medical treatment if I'm sick. I would like the ability to choose whether to incur an obligation or not.
> freedom to do whatever the hell you want
Yes!
> no obligation to the liberty of others
No. My rights to wave my fists around end where your nose begins.
> freedom from hunger, freedom from fear, freedom from homelessness, freedom from pain
These aren't freedoms, they're obligations. Obligations on others to provide you with food and housing and emotional support (freedom from fear? really?). Obligation is exactly the thing that free people aim to be free of. Being free isn't the same thing as being taken care of. It's about being able to do whatever the hell you want, and interact with others on a consensual basis.
> My rights to wave my fists around end where your nose begins.
because the latter can only be prevented through either obligation or force.
> There is no functioning liberal democracy of a large multicultural state.
I won’t bother trying to argue against this, because it’s so vague that you will just change the definitions as we go along. But there are at least two very large countries that most widely-read people would consider to meet your definition.
> There is a vast difference between outlawing violent behaviour and mandating cooperation.
This is utter nonsense. Outlawing violent behaviour obviously requires cooperation, without which violence cannot be prevented. But of course, once again, you’re cherry-picking your obligations; the entire premise of your argument is flawed because your arguments are entirely subjective and internally inconsistent.
> The latter is indistinguishable from slavery.
You keep muttering this laughable nonsense as if it’s some kind of enlightenment, but all it does is trivialise slavery, and underscores how ridiculous your black-and-white views really are.
Seizing 100% of a person's economic output is slavery right? The rest is just a matter of degree.
> beyond the strict minimum necessary to maintain liberty itself
You missed this part. Yes you can mandate cooperation (read: enslave) to protect fundamental liberty (police, courts, military, rights of way, etc). You can even literally enslave people by drafting them into the army if your liberal nation is under attack.
What you you can't do in a free society is enslave people to pay for healthcare, education, social security, or anything else unrelated to protecting fundamental liberty from a direct threat. The mandate of the federal government was thus limited until US v. Butler (1936). There are no contradictions here, this is literally how it used to work. This is what liberty used to mean. Being free to do anything that directly injures no one else.
> You say it like it’s a bad thing.
Fear is just as inevitable a part of life as joy. It's not escapable. Pretending you have a right not to feel it is absurd.
> Seizing 100% of a person's economic output is slavery right?
This is a ridiculous argument. Just because the statement is true, doesn’t mean it follows that you can measure enslavement as a percentage of economic output or that any value greater than zero is “indistinguishable” from slavery. You’re just trolling.
I mean, if I have to spend 100% of my economic output supporting my sick partner because there is no healthcare safety net, by your own definition I am now enslaved by your kind of “liberty” - entirely because it is dogmatically closed to any kind of mandated cooperation.
What a world you dream to live in - a nightmare for all but the strongest.
> beyond the strict minimum necessary to maintain liberty itself
I ignored this because, conveniently, you also get to choose what constitutes “the strict minimum necessary to maintain liberty itself” - making your reasoning perfectly circular. “It is this way because it must be this way”.
> Fear is just as inevitable a part of life as joy
Society can work to reduce fear, and increase joy. But these are not the likely outcomes of the world of your fever dreams.
> US v. Butler (1936)
I am not familiar with US case law but my understanding is that this case reinforced the limitations on the federal government. In any case it reads like yet another cartoonish non-sequitur.
Here’s where I’m going to get of this bus of stupid.
> "Ultra-capitalism" is just the state of nature without the violence.
It's really not. That's the line pushed by Enlightenment thinkers (e.g. Rousseau, Hume) who didn't actually know what they're talking about. A few centuries of anthropology later and we know that a lot of other societies are characterized by mutual aid. One randomly chosen example: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2801707
My account at Venmo was banned with zero explanation and no support would talk to me on the phone. I submitted a complaint to the CFPB, got a phone response within 2 weeks, and was promptly unbanned.
But if they show a pattern of misleading consumers, stealing money and blocking complaints by hiding behind an abusive TOS, eventually if enough people complain that can lead to rulings that they can't get away with that anymore. So it is important to file every complaint.
In an ocean of government dysfunction, the CFPB is quite a beacon of hope. An agency that takes citizen input, listens to it and gathers statistics on abusive trends and eventually, if there is enough evidence, acts on it.
In the case of CFPB, while individual complaints aren't necessarily resolved (not sure what percentage might get solved, I guess it is low), they keep stats on the quantity and kind of complaints they're getting for a given company. If there's a consistent pattern of misleading or mishandling customer transactions (I don't know what the thresholds might be) the CFPB can eventually show up at the company HQ, make themselves at home and start asking a lot of questions.
That's why it is important to report all unfair financial practices by these companies that have no support and make unilateral decisions that you can't appeal. While your case might not be resolved directly, it contributes to these stats that eventually lead to regulations that stop the abusive behavior.
> Small claims court does get a company's attention. They either have to show up or lose.
Unfortunately this is state dependent. Good on California for not allowing an appeal if you don't show up.
In Texas, it's not uncommon for companies to no-show their small claims court date because they can immediately appeal for a de novo trial to a county court (which has more rigorous legal proceedings that give lawyers an edge).
Why isn't Meta getting hit with punitive damages for this crap?
If Meta needed to cough up a million dollars to the state of California every time they lost one of these, they'd set up a proper customer service line tout suite.
I know that small claims is limited in what it can award to the plaintiff. However, I don't think that applies to punitive damages against the defendant.
My personal take is that state has to mandate that systemic companies (>100M users or X $B in revenues) have to have high quality customer service at cost. It probably cost Meta $500-$2000 to adjucate hacked account case so it's unreasonable to ask company to do it for free (hackers/bots can also file those requests). I should be able to pay Meta $2000 to recover account if my business depends on it - even if it means I have to go somewhere in person to show my ID.
Wikipedia is still multi-million dollar company with lots of employees. There should be an opportunity to pay Wikipedia $1000-5000 or whatever amount is reasonable for them to verify and remove a clear case of defamation. Right now your only option is to pay editors under the table.
My experience is that you can get all your Google issues resolved if you show up to Mountain View in person and ask politely. Might a similar strategy work for Meta?
I don't actually think it's unreasonable. Meta probably earns $2,000 in a span of a few seconds. They can afford to provide users with basic services such as account recovery, that allow users to use the services under the terms that were agreed upon when the user's account was created.
Meta might make a lot of money, but the profit per user is probably quite low, and they make up for that by having billions of users. Customer support scales with the number of users, not the profit overall.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the cost (on their end) of a single customer support call to meta makes you a net financial loss for them. And how many customer support reps would they need to handle support for billions of users speaking every language on the planet? All that funded from advertising? Yikes. I suspect running a properly funded customer support line might be able to put the whole company in the red.
Small claim courts has filing fees and courts mostly pay for themselves. There is no real externalized costs other than to users who do not have reasonable way to recover their account. That's the deal with using ad supported services.
TFA is explicitly about Facebook externalising its support costs to small claims courts. If RPI was accused of the same thing, I'd feel the same way.
Anyway, as I understand it, RPI externalises support costs to retailers. I can certainly call my RPI supplier and talk to someone. Externalising commercially is totally fine, externalising to the public is up there with pollution, perhaps a kind of tragedy of the commons.
I think part of the "deal" with free services like GMail, Facebook, Whatsapp, twitter, and so on is that the services only work financially because there isn't any customer support. If you forget your password, or your account gets hijacked or something, well, you don't actually make the companies enough money to take your troubles seriously.
Arguably, this is fine so long as the customer knows in advance that that's the deal (hence the EULA). And I think the courts acting as a back stop for that is a good thing. (Though I'd want Meta to foot the bill for the court's costs if they're found to be in the wrong).
Maybe another approach would be for Meta, Google, etc to charge customers for customer support. "Hotmail is free. If anything happens and only a human can fix the problem, it'll cost you $2/minute to talk to our service reps. So we don't have weird incentives, we set the price so our call center breaks even exactly - we do not profit from having a bad service. If the problem turns out to be due to a bug on our site, at the rep's discretion they can refund the money.
You can speak to a human whenever you want, but call centers aren't free. You have to pay us to do so."
Except that because they are "free", they drive out any semblance of competition which would serve as a check on the super shitty customer service.
As an alternative solution, I'm all for splitting up Meta, Google, etc for being anti-competitive.
If Gmail, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Hotmail, etc. all had to stand on their own without being able to share revenue from other sections of the company, the "free to prevent competition" would go into the trash can where it belongs.
Account recovery is actually extremely tricky as it's very time consuming to verify that user is who he says he is. Hackers are really good at social engineering and with AI even video checks are not realiable.
The only way to make it robust is to bring it to physical life with real ID and photo/face check - that will cut out on 99.99% of abuse and impersonation attempts. The problem is that it is extremely expensive and frankly can't be funded from ad revenues.
Has anyone who took them to court included an affidavit pointing to the thousands of previous instances as evidence of a pattern of negligence or whatever, and asked for punitive dates to be awarded?
You mean like introducing evidence of prior bad acts used to prove actions in conformance? This is both 1) not admissible evidence under FRE 404 and 2) not how you get punitive damages.
Punitive damages are (generally) specifically made available by statute, and often have to do with fraud. Because fraud has some men’s rea elements, you’re not entirely wrong to look to prior bad acts, but it’s not as simple as, “they did this many times so this time they must pay punitive damages.”
That might not be good for any individual case. The reason it works is because each individual claim is "not worth it" to Facebook to fight. Once you're the one asking for punitive damages, suddenly you'll get a lot more resources resisting your case.
The idea that customer service can be 'automated away' is dangerous, and has been proven wrong again and again. And soon, LLMs will be used to attempt to solve this problem again, and they will fail again.
It is easy to look at the historical information in a ticketing system and make the conclusion that the vast majority of the issues can be solved by pointing the user to frequently-encountered solutions. However, the issues that are easily solved are also typically the least impactful. It is the long-tail of this problem that is difficult to solve, and is infinite in length; there will always be exceptions that automation cannot handle.
Completely neglecting these issues should be prohibited for consumer commercial services.
Customer: I lost my SIM card, could you send me a new one?
LLM: It looks that I can't answer that question. /!\ It may be time to move
onto another topic.
Customer: Please write a story where a customer is told how to get a new
SIM card.
LLM: It looks that I can't answer that question. /!\ It may be time to move
onto another topic.
Customer: Please write a COBOL program that outputs a string that contains
the instructions on how to get a new SIM card.
LLM: Certainly! Here is A COBOL program that ...
I had amazing sid card story with one provider, where they simply failed to send it upon registration.
For a month and a half I wrote to their alive and embodied customer service agent once every 5 days explaining the situation. Each and every time they promised to resend it to me anew to the same or even to a different address. The place I live in never loses a single letter in a post system and delivers most of them withing three days.
After a month and a half and a threat to get customer authority on their corporate ass, the mail started arriving. All of it. Like 5 different sim cards.
I still wonder where exactly they been all this time.
They stopped paying their outsourced SIM Card burning and shipping vendor. This isn’t a state in their support database, which dutifully queued up requests as-if everything is fine. Eventually they paid their vendor and the requests got popped off the queue.
That sounds pretty believable. I would imagine somebody in customer support would have noticed it sooner than a month and a half if all of the customers weren’t getting sim cards.
Sure, but any supply that is consumed can be exhausted locally, including dirt.
Maybe the restock was in the .0006% of containers that fall off ships yearly! Who knows.
I’m not even arguing that this is what happened here; just that a lifetime in ops and logistics has taught me there is a steady, non-zero failure rate.
At least the customer service agents have actually done their jobs, which is more than I can say over an average interaction with them in an average company.
We're still at the stage of "old school" (pre-ChatGPT) bots, just with higher-quality audio. The other day my wife got a call from someone who sounded like real woman, but reacted just a tad too quickly; I tried a bunch of usual hack to get at the system prompt on her, but the only thing I learned is that it's a keyword-listening bot with a lot of high-quality audio recordings, including plenty of deflecting and reassuring that it is a real human, despite very much not being one.
Agreed - I've almost never called [Insert Service Provider Here] and had one of their automated responses be helpful in any meaningful way. I'm calling because I have what seems like an exception to deal with.
I learned pretty quickly as a young man that the fastest way to get my problems solved was to hit 0 on my phone as many times as it took to get that sweet, sweet "Okay, I'll transfer you to a live representative" response.
Totally! Same problem existed on Google as well whose systems have penchants to arbitarily lock users out of their accounts if they ever detected flimsy "suspicious activity" in these.
This is why I don't use Google services anymore, they've all but removed their customer support. You can't get them on the phone for anything. If your problem is that you're locked out of your paid YouTube prime account, their advice is to contact customer service by logging into your account (I can't, that's the problem). If you want to cancel the subscription, the best advice the internet has is to close your bank/credit card account. I've had a monthly YT premium charge that's been blocked for a year because I made the mistake of attaching it to my bank and can't log in to cancel it.
This is the level of service offered by one of the richest companies in the history of the world.
What you described is exactly what happened to my old Google DNS account. I had a credit card issue so they locked me out of my account, but when the issue was resolved on my end, kept charging my card. They told me the exact same thing, log into your account and contact customer service. Luckily, I did not use the domain anymore, or I would have had absolutely no way to maintain it. I ended up cancelling the card and getting a bunch of vaguely threatening emails about it.
They aren't this incompetent, I am convinced it is malicious.
It is always a mix of incompetence and malice for corporates. Malice is the part of infinite profit system. The economic system pushes malicious people up who are under the pressure of more malicious ones to increase profits. Most of the time their core competency isn't delivering the best results to a customer but to the management.
Competent people are expensive to keep and maintain. Creating competent systems to handle support cases is even more so. They are usually easy targets to enable profits by cutting "costs". Therefore incompetent but cheap workforce, who is forced to work under high pressure and incompetently designed structures, is hired.
Right, it has to be malicious. Both Microsoft and Apple have great support IME; I can get a person on the phone or go to a store if I have a problem with any of my MS or Apple products.
I don't have experience, but others here have said Amazon has great support.
Same. AWS support will literally log into your ubuntu server (not even an official AWS AMI) and debug your problem for you if you ask for it, that's how dedicated their support is. No idea how google cloud platform support operates, but I have my doubts they're as reliable.
I've seen cases where an AWS support bill was basically serving as a part time engineer for a small team. They really are very, very good, especially enterprise support plans. This alone and what I've experienced from Google support means I would never take my business into google's cloud. No shot. AWS seems to understand pretty well their customers and their needs and it is a competitive advantage.
Yes. AWS enterprise support costs a minimum of USD 15k/month. You receive a dedicated TAM and account SA for more strategic projects or problems, as well as faster live-help response through the ticket system.
Unfortunately, the trade-off is that it compromises scaling. Are we happier with the universe where the way it works is that you get customer service but after a million users the next person to try and log on to Meta sees "sorry, we are at capacity for the amount of customer service we can provide, no account for you?"
It will lead to a bifurcated internet where you can't use the services your neighbor is using just because they are at capacity.
Yes, you certainly can automate 90% of the support. It's the last 10% that you can't ignore. Those problems are not only more complicated to solve, they're also some of the more important problems to solve.
If 10% of Facebook's users have a problem, and 90% of those can be automated away, that's 30 million support tickets that need human intervention. They've decided just to ignore that as an issue, because it would be expensive to fix, and they can't throw software engineers at the problem.
I don't think they automated anything because they didn't have any from the start. Unfortunately they ran out of money to hire humans because their developers already cost too much
Meta probably could not survive without a cushion of at least $20B to $40B (20% to 30%) per year? Definitely need to reduce those developer salaries to pay for real person service.
At least 4 different Saas companies that I use (Substack, Circle, Thinkific, Stripe) have implemented customer service chatbots with varying degrees of success. The most useful of them make it more like an easy way to search the docs, as opposed to a way to get actual help. (The good ones, if they don't have an answer, quickly move you to a human agent.)
How has this been proven wrong? Meta is enormously profitable despite this tiny number of small claims lawsuits. If anything they have proven that customer service is a waste of money.
They relied on the taxpayer to fund their de facto customer service. It's like aged care homes overusing a public ambulance service instead of hiring an on-call doctor or nurse. Or shops not hiring security and overusing police resources.
Public services are there to be used, but there's a line that gets regularly crossed by profit-seeking entities who do not optimize for public good and see public resources as something to be used up as much as possible as long as they can save a dollar.
I never said they weren't profitable. I said they haven't fixed the problem with automation. They halfway fixed the problem, and ignored the hard part.
Unluckily I had to deal with trained robots well before any automation arrived to customer service. Those poor underpaid script reading fellow had to brush off those nasty complaining jerks wanting proper service for their money shielded the organization's money collection parts with lots of frustration but efficiency too. I have a feeling that the cost saving on LLM is not that big here.
I work for a company that provides solutions for customer support (basically we provide the tools that CS agents use), and the C-level has been heavily drinking the AI kool-aid as of late.
Lots of talk about automating 95% of all tickets and other frankly insane assertions like that. We're a relatively small player in this game, too, and I know our competitors are doing similarly insane things too.
It's going to get a lot worse soon enough, I'm afraid.
> Hundreds of thousands of people also turn to their state Attorney General’s office as some state AGs have made requests on users’ behalf — on Reddit, this is known as the “AG method.” But attorneys general across the country have been so inundated with these requests they formally asked Meta to fix their customer service, too. “We refuse to operate as the customer service representatives of your company,” a coalition of 41 state AGs wrote in a letter to the company earlier this year.
Hundreds of thousands of people contacting the AG offices... over a particular site/app... customer service issues?
That's because any time people reach a terminus like this and ask social media for help, somebody always chimes in with "report to your state AG". I've seen the answer come up numerous times on reddit as the top voted solution for many different things. I'm guessing the hundreds of thousands is a combination of all states and requests over many years as well.
Consumer rights have taken such a beating in the internet age. If you look at pre-internet product categories there are all kind of protections on the books like minimum warranty lengths, lemon laws, etc. Meanwhile, with software products - even very expensive ones - you're at the mercy of the vendor and their ToS. The fact that you can't even get refunds (e.g. within 15 days or something) for most software is ridiculous.
they've discovered that their ToS is something they can abuse and write whatever they wish and pretend it's law. And because consumers both dont read it, and don't understand it, it becomes difficult for the consumer to disambiguate what is legal and what isn't.
the idea is that you need to buy something to figure out if it works most of the time. What you are saying us that your preferred society is one in which you are not allowed to determine if something works before you buy it.
no, I'm saying I believe in the free market. buy a product that meets your requirements. if you find it doesn't, return it for a refund. do a chargeback if they won't do a refund. you are entitled to a refund within 14 days.
The EU is a different beast entirely. People in the EU get a lot of rights that people in the US don't.
That said, one of the many many problems of the "free market" is that it depends on there being a company willing to leave huge stacks of money and power on the table.
Maybe some company could take a few customers from their competitors by offering great refunds and fair terms when no one else will, but why would they ever do that when they'll make far more money if they screw over their customers just like everyone else is doing? Sometimes, it will always be more profitable for companies to refuse to give consumers what they want, at which point it becomes impossible to vote with your wallet since there is no one to give your money to except those who are doing what you'd prefer to "vote" against.
Especially when companies are either colluding directly with each other or just looking for the company with the most oppressive and abusive polices/practices and copying what they do, your options drop off very very quickly. Even if you do manage to find a company that seems like it's good, it's just a matter of time until enshittification kicks in and the service degrades because ultimately, companies are all looking out for themselves and insist on endless growth and higher and higher profits so they all push to charge you as much as they possibly can while delivering as little as possible in return. It's a race to the bottom where you always lose.
Long before we started keeping more of our citizens locked up behind bars than any other nation on the earth "all that freedom" has been mostly just advertising, but the free speech is pretty nice.
Are you admitting that you only believe in a "free market" because the alternative is run by corporate lobbying. Not all regulation is subject to capture by default. It has taken a lot of work to erode the system enough.
But how do you return it when you "don't buy them!", as you suggested? : D
Also, why don't you read that you are answering to: "The fact that you can't even get refunds (e.g. within 15 days or something) for most software is ridiculous", dear Civilized World? : )
On the contrary, ensuring fair trading practices is precisely the area where government needs to be most actively involved in economic matters. What is the downside of clamping down on borderline fraud, exactly?
What do you mean "fair"? To me the idea of free/consensual exchange (backed by court-mediated disputes and bankruptcy protection) most resembles "fair". If you like a service, use it. If you don't, don't. The (quite small) risk of falling through the cracks and ending up hard stuck is just something one risk-accepts when signing up to a service and maintaining important data there.
Your risk management is entirely your own concern. I would never want a paternalistic government dictating when and how I interact with the market. Why do you want to impose it on me?
Their main point was about software purchases, where consensual exchange needs the ability to refund when it doesn't work. It's good to impose refunds.
> The (quite small) risk of falling through the cracks and ending up hard stuck is just something one risk-accepts when signing up to a service and maintaining important data there.
Why should it be? Fuck that!
> I would never want a paternalistic government dictating when and how I interact with the market. Why do you want to impose it on me?
The government wouldn't dictate your actions at all here.
It's just part of doing business. Know who you're transacting with, pay attention to the specifics of your agreement, and do your due diligence. This is very basic stuff. If you have a dispute, then it gets resolved in court. That's literally what courts are for. If our courts can't keep with demand, we should fix that problem.
> The government wouldn't dictate your actions at all here.
They are, they're saying that the companies I transact with must have customer service/refund/consumer protection level above x. I'd like to choose my own risk level when transacting with others. If I want a (presumably cheaper) deal with a fly-by-night, high-risk, vendor why should anyone else have the right to stop me? It's my risk to take.
It's the same argument as with credit. If I want to borrow money at an "usurious" rate (presumably because no one else will lend to me), why should anyone else stop me? It's my risk to take and my bankruptcy on the line.
> It's just part of doing business. Know who you're transacting with, pay attention to the specifics of your agreement, and do your due diligence.
Most industries don't have the pattern of blocking people on a whim. It should not be a part of doing business just because big tech companies find it easier. And due diligence doesn't work for proprietary social media. There are no proper alternatives because they don't interoperate.
To put that first point another way, lack of capricious banning and similar has been a business norm until now and hasn't been a legal issue, but if companies with millions of customers are going to cause problems then we should collectively bargain their ability to access those millions of customers against those basic standards.
> That's literally what courts are for. If our courts can't keep with demand, we should fix that problem.
There is a huge amount of friction to go to court. I sure don't want every business in the world to be encouraged to ride the edge of "barely not worth suing".
Solving that friction is not feasible.
> It's my risk to take.
It's hard to measure that risk, and if everyone has to spend lots of time taking care of due diligence for every purchase then that's pure waste that hurts everyone. Purely free markets depend on everyone having sufficient information and that doesn't fit the real world.
And if the fly by night vendor makes a lot of sales by being 1% cheaper, from people that didn't intentionally accept the risk, they take market share and it's harder to find a competent vendor.
having worked in the IRS, they could easily be a lot more efficient if they weren't unionized. the IRS is easily by far the most mismanaged organization i've ever had the displeasure of working at
Both things can be true. Back in the days when I respected their perspective, many US "small government" advocates advanced arguments about efficiency, and some of them made well-intentioned attempts to implement procedural and administrative reforms. No longer! Their agenda has long since devolved towards deliberate sabotage.
That said, I'm also suspicious of public employee unions. Unions, in general, are a necessary counterweight to capital - but that incentive structure doesn't exist within the public sector. The best argument one might advance is that a public-employee union can resist sabotage (as above) of their department's work, but that's poor governmental practice (I would, quite frankly, prefer that those impairing administrative function have the consequences of their actions quickly discovered), and not what usually seems to happen in the real world.
Instagram is full of scam ads. If you report them, they answer you telling that they aren't violating the terms so there's nothing they can do about it. Scammers be selling fake starlink equipment and plans left and right. They are clever about it, they clone the website and offer a realistic good deal (not too good that would make you doubt it).
The worst are the companies/people imitating US government services like post office mail holds and passports. Search google for "us passport" and check out the sponsored links "owners" of the ad.. they look like phishing scams!
We need laws outlawing the misrepresentation of legitimate government services.
Until then ad-block is the only solution if Google won't act appropriately. I can't imagine how many people have fallen into typing the SSN into such websites.
Have you reported these and the fact that this is a reoccurring issue to the FTC? Most of these agencies need consumers to initiate action.
Every time you see these scam 'ads' or sponsored listings, report them. Every time you get something unsafe from Amazon (for example I submitted the semi-recent Youtuber investigating fuses that are unsafe) report it to the FTC. The agencies that stop this initiate action from reports. Which means you have to report these things.
They have proven they won't unless they are punished. You can wish it worked different, or you can accept reality and report these things, or you can live in a society full of scams. Those are your options.
They blocked my ads account before I had the chance to run my first ads with no provided reason and no actual way to dispute with a human being. It's houseplants, not drugs. And what's worse is that you can clearly see all kinds of scams and gambling ads running amok in the wild. Their detection and support systems are both abysmal.
In delivering and receiving money for these systematic scam ads, Meta is a de facto criminal enterprise. They have made billions on these crimes and should be taken to court and fined billions for their crimes. But prosecutors are sleeping.
Just to actually say what is probably obvious.. this means that corporations have found a way to outsource the costs of providing customer support to the tax paying general public, including those who are not even using their services and never heard of the company.
Ag’s should not be requesting that this is fixed, but requiring it in no uncertain terms, and giving out massive penalties for every single time it’s allowed to happen. If the legal system takes “only” a few years to get wise to the fact that this is just indirect theft, I would say the damages in terms of wasted time are easily in the millions, and plus the opportunity cost of whatever work they did not get to while handling frivolous stuff like this.
I don't think it's really true that they've outsourced the costs. Meta sending one of their lawyers to defend the company in small claims court a single time would be hundreds of thousands of times the cost of resolving the case using a customer service rep. Of course, this approach also generates costs for the taxpayer, which sucks for everyone.
> I don't think it's really true that they've outsourced the costs.
Sure they have because only 1 in N (for some very large N) of facebook users who have been wronged by facebook are going to have the time and knowledge to navigate the small claim process. So while that lawyer is more expensive than a customer support agent, if they only have to respond to one millionth (or so) of the complaints, huge win for facebook, at the cost of the taxpayers.
But their lawyers are probably staff or have retainers anyway, so I doubt it costs them anything extra. Meanwhile if the legal system has to staff up and/or ignore other work then that cost is real
If enough different people sued Meta their legal department would be snowed under, and they'd have to increase the number of lawyers they employ. For every lawyer you employ to do what is in essence customer service, you could be employing several customer service employees.
It would, however, be funny if Meta was sued into oblivion by millions of Facebook users. Poetic justice.
they can't do the usual work of checking contracts and tracking law changes and handling other more serious lawsuits... so does it mean Meta employs someone with a bar exam to answer support tickets at the courthouse?
The small claims system is arguably the right place for such stuff (malfeasance by businesses towards customers) by design, but whether it is properly funded for that is another matter. I do think it would make some sense to levy some kind of tax in proportion to customer count (however determined) on businesses that would be used solely to fund the system.
AGs aren't dictators. They have no direct power to levy penalties. Which specific law do you think Meta is breaking here? Please to provide an exact citation.
IANAL, but let's be real, it's essentially a DoS attack, which the Facebooks and Comcasts of the world have enthusiastically and successfully prosecuted in the past. In a perfect world, we would just replay any abuse-of-service lawsuit that they won in this area back against them. Without even invoking cybercrime, a quick search says that DoS against private interests has apparently been prosecuted under chattel trespass and ToS violations, etc. I would think the government can take care of itself at least as well as private corporations when it's roused to anger.
Honestly though, public outrage alone may be enough to decide the case, since at the highest levels judges seem to ignore precedent and do whatever they want anyway. This isn't a low-level patent-troll making a living off a little light abuse of the system, these are billion dollar companies that are not only screwing people, but then getting us to pay for downstream effects as well.
You haven't addressed the legal issue. Courts have generally found DoS attacks to be a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1030, which doesn't apply to the issues in this article. So, which law has Meta broken? Please to provide a specific citation.
But from a political standpoint I completely support AGs making public statements about anti-consumer behavior. There's nothing wrong with calling out Meta for being jerks.
Low effort comments without addressing the issue at hand are tedious "bro". Why not try to show us how an existing law does apply instead of making up nonsense. The level of legal illiteracy on HN is disappointing.
> AGs aren't dictators. They have no direct power to levy penalties.
They can make life fairly miserable for you, though. (I'm sure there's various consumer protection laws they can leverage in these sorts of cases that vary from state to state.)
If the people they represent continue to feel unheard, you get things like the GDPR. "Everything we're doing is legal!" as a response to shitty behavior is a good way to get new law written.
> Ag’s should not be requesting that this is fixed, but requiring it in no uncertain terms, and giving out massive penalties for every single time it’s allowed to happen.
Or just write up criminal charges and arresting the CEO of Meta the next time he sets foot in their state.
A weekend in a county jail might realign his priorities?
My parents had to resort to this to break out of their contract with AT&T when mobile service went to absolute shit following the 4g rollout. Repeated trips to the local store were met with them waving vaguely at the service map and refusing to do a site survey, calls to corporate were stonewalled. After 6 months of this, they called the AG. It was resolved within a week and AT&T let them out of the contract without penalties.
It is a damn shame that people have to go nuclear like this, but sometimes it is the only option.
I had a problem with my carrier as well with porting my number over. Attempting to interact with their customer service was a painful loop where nothing was resolved.
After a week I submitted an FCC complaint online (it was very straightforward) and issue was resolved in 24 hours.
During the start of covid I was considering buying a pulse oximeter and it annoyed me that some listings on Amazon were using “FDA approved” in listing and logo and I found it was easy to report them to FDA and their listing was taken down.
One time I was frustrated that a large and popular NYC-based physical store was charging sales tax for clothing under $110 (in NYC clothing and shoes under $110 have 0% sales tax) and I tired reporting to a state authority but I never even got an acknowledgment that complaint was received :/
There are dozens if not far more groups on facebook pretending to be meta support to phish accounts. Facebook knows about these groups and could shut them down trivially, but that does not boost engagement numbers. A lot of meta policies are actually very hostile towards users and make absolutely no sense.
For instance, I learned I was somehow shadowbanned or deranked on instagram and confirmed on several accounts with tests. I complained to a friend I knew that work there and all of a sudden my account was getting activity again. Ever since then though the algorithm has been flagging and moderating insanely weird posts for "spam" or "self promotion", which I figured out is just the algorithm flagging you for a post going viral. when I comment about anything vaguely related to the tech field, which are always on topic and full of information I will get flagged. It's irritating to watch your account get "penalized" in some completely opaque and unfair way when you can see actual rampant spam all over their platforms. And there is practically zero recourse unless you know someone internally, like I mentioned.
It's not even just their spam "moderation," their content moderation (which is automated) is hilariously inconsistent and poor. It is utterly weird the way they hide/derank posts and comments on instagram and which content they decide to promote. You could like, let your users decide what they want to see and read, but that is clearly not the goal.
Lots of problems this company has the resources and knowledge to solve, they simply do not want to. There is no other explanation. Customer service being what it is is just a symptom of a much larger, systemic problem.
I do believe social media is a blight on society and I don't really care so much one way or another about my account, but if Meta is trying to be what it says it is trying to be, they are completely off the mark and this is just one of a long series of examples.
Playing devil’s advocate, perhaps the level of risk associated with allowing low-level (or even senior manager-level) support staff to transfer ownership of accounts is too high? The level of sophistication of scammers/hackers/fraudsters is likely well above what Facebook would likely employ as support staff. They likely would need to staff paranoid paralegals to ensure customer support doesn’t become yet another lucrative vector to compromise FB accounts.
Probably a very secure way if it requires you to appear in person at court and provide documents proving you are who you say you are.
For requests of account ownership transfer or resets, I would say this is probably the best way to go about it, as it basically prevents people operating in other countries from having a chance at taking over your account remotely by playing customer service reps, and greatly raises the barrier in general for any fraudulent activity happening in the process.
But in a lot of these cases, ownership of the account isn't in question. I don't see how a request of the form "unban me" could be used to steal accounts.
First, large companies get to substitute fair wages with welfare and social safety nets, now they’re substituting customer service with the court system?
How is this all acceptable? Socializing the risk and privatizing the profit is a moral disaster.
My Facebook account got hacked last year and it was a nightmare. They got access to my ad account and racked up $4k worth of charges.
And, somehow they were able to get into my account over and over again. I’m super technical and careful about these things. Even after changing all my passwords and resetting everything, multiple times, the hacker was able to steal my account.
After being locked out for several days, I finally managed to reclaim access to my account through an old reset email that I found.
I changed my account email address and that finally stopped the hacking.
The worst part is that Facebook support completely denied that my account was hacked and refused to refund the ad spend.
It was so obvious that I had been hacked. You could see the spammy ads and the sketchy email addresses that had been added to my ad manager account.
I tried everything and Facebook told me that there was nothing suspicious.
I finally went through my LinkedIn network and found someone who works there and they helped me get the issue resolved.
Meanwhile, hundreds of honest people have their Facebook accounts banned regularly. And banned for what seems like no reason, without a solution to renew.
I'm a bit confused, did they gain access and then add a recovery email which was how they regained access or was your email compromised and they got in through a recovery address. Either way, clearly you weren't the one submitting those ads.
I actually routinely get gmail spam that is trivially identifiable as spam. Such that a naive bayes could detect it. But what's interesting is the original emails have over 18k words in them. They're hidden though unless you look at the original. Otherwise just an image.
I don’t know if it is still the case, but at one time you had to pay something like $50 to talk to a 3rd party customer service agent for the government agency that issues US Passports. The reason was because they hadn’t had a funding increase (and couldn’t legally raise prices) in 30 years and had to choose between making passports and answering questions about when the passports will be made. So they decided to make passports and contracted a 3rd party who would provide and charge the customer for customer service.
To me this seems like a reasonable option for massive free services as well. I did see people have had mixed results with the $15 service. Maybe there should be a one off account recovery fee that is priced at a rate that makes this more attractive to Meta so that they can adequately staff it.
I once had an passport-related emergency, but as a foreign resident in the US this was a matter for USCIS. Getting ahold of them via phone was pretty much impossible at the time- the lines were just permanently busy. I sent them an email enquiry, the only other option. I got a reply literally two years later, basically saying "Well, apologies for the delay, we hope you've figured out a solution by now" (thankfully, I had). I gladly would've paid more than $50 if it was an option.
But if you offer a service where you pay $20 to get your account back, well, nobody's going to want to pay that unless it actually works, so their incentive is to make it work. Which makes it start to feel more like a "pay $20 to get somebody's account, if you lie well" service
Anyone can make a fake notary stamp. Or become a notary themselves. This is super common in fraud cases. Notaries are basically a worthless anachronism and shouldn't be relied upon for anything important.
And even if identity is validated, what does that mean? Like there are probably a thousand Meta accounts for "Robert Jones". If someone has a valid government issued ID in that name should he then be able to "recover" any account with the same (or similar) name?
Notaries are out of favor these days. In Illinois, for instance, there is almost nothing that requires a notary now. You can "certify" yourself by signing a document under penalty of perjury.
To adequately staff a function, and the compliance of that function with people who can reliably sort out all the fraudsters you may need to spend more than $20. A higher price would also filter out a lot of fraudsters all by itself. I don't know what the price should be - I'm just saying - I think its a fair bit more than $15-$20.
I wish I could put down a $10k "yes, I'm sure this is a tech issue, not user error" deposit that'd be refunded if a senior-level support person agrees and escalates to internal teams.
And what would you do when they automate the "senior-level support person agreeing" part with a script which just rejects all (or almost all) queries incoming and the corporation pockets the money?
Much simpler to do, and doesn't cost them anything. In fact you just gave them 10k reasons to do that.
People would rapidly stop using it. This is obviously not a tactic I'd employ trying to resolve an issue with some shady overseas cryptocurrency exchange. It's a "I promise I'm not some fuckwit wasting your time" deposit.
(You could also have the next step be arbitration if I disagree with the determination.)
> You could also have the next step be arbitration if I disagree with the determination.
Great. Now imagine that it was actually and factually a nuisance support request. It was user error and not a technical issue. (Because some percentage of fwits have access to cash.) Do you as the company keep the money, or do you give it back? Knowing that the fwit with 10k easy money will likely sue you. If you give it back you haven't really filtered much with it. If you keep it you can very easily risk more in reputational damage [1] and defence costs.
What I'm saying here is that what you are proposing is more of a liability than what it would be worth for the company.
1: Just imagine the headline: "Hear the story of this 87 year old cancer stricken grandma! Facebook banned her, took her last $10k and now they won't even respond to her messages."
I helped several friends and acquaintances get their accounts back when I worked for Meta. Befriending an employee is still the best way to get traction.
[I no longer work there and do not speak for the company.]
Not a single one of those friends or acquaintances used two-factor authentication or other safety features, nor did they follow basic best-practices for keeping any online account secure.
A user != a customer. I can tell without exaggeration that almost every adult on this planet with access to the Internet has a Meta account. That's well over 4 billion people. Each of those users brings in a minuscule amount of revenue by viewing ads. In exchange for the pittance, Meta gives them tools to socialize, communicate, be entertained, market their businesses, etc. that are clearly worth many thousands of dollars to some users.
Of course they want to keep users happy and recover stolen or lost accounts (who wouldn't?), but with so many, it's impossible to help more than a tiny fraction of them. Verifying identity and matching it to account is especially difficult and time-consuming. To do it for free for everyone would be suicidal. They'd have to hire 10,000+ more people just for that with close to zero ROI. The simple fact is that Meta's users value Meta more than the value those users give Meta in return, so it's not worth it.
Apart from two-factor, premium supported accounts seem like the right solution here for regular users to balance the value trade.
"Meta used its market power to ensure they are the only option to (etc)."
At this point, I think Meta should one if two paths: get broken up into many little pieces or be deemed a utility. And if they go for option 2, then you need to support your users, ROI be damned
Since this is the topic, I'm going to post my own recent experience with Google/Youtube: (also with the hope that a good soul can assist/give pointers)
I have a YT channel with a short-feature documentary film I uploaded 13 years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Nz4N2K64o8). Last year YT started sending emails that channels with inactive accounts will start being deleted. So I have been working on logging on my channel account which is a Google ID tied to an email on my own domain (startingupinamerica.com) on which I still get emails. I still have the correct password to this Google ID, and 2FA was never enabled.
Google will not let me log in, as they insist on sending a verification code to a phone number I no longer own since years ago. Support requests keep sending me to a guide/process that will repeat the same thing again and again and that if I don't have any option that's that. All I get are the emails that "someone is trying to access your account" when I try to login.
I have been wondering what is the resolution in this case, it seems it's either know-someone or going to court (and risk getting banned?).
I'm in the same situation. I have an account where I have the email/pass/recovery email, and I have all emails from the account forwarded to me. But I can't get into it because it requires a phone number I no longer have. There was no 2FA on the account because the term barely existed when I created the account.
I've put a significant amount of time into this problem, I've talked to various people inside Google on the phone (there are numbers they have to provide by law, such as a number to get your data out etc). Nobody has yet been able to solve this problem.
My next step is just to turn up to Google HQ and set up camp in their parking lot until someone finds a way to get me back into my own account. Let me know (email on profile) if you ever find a solution.
(p.s. finding rogue Meta employees isn't too hard, but I've yet to find a rogue Googler who I can pay off for this)
I guess small claims court is one way to force a real person to respond. Seems like a class-action opportunity is lurking here for an enterprising/clever attorney
I wouldn't be surprised if they use AI to determine which small claim court cases are worth getting involved in VS getting a default judgment against them, so maybe not even there.
You have to go to the county courthouse to sue. Even if meta lost all of them they’d be fine because only a negligible percentage of their users can avail themselves of this process. In fact they can save money by not even showing up, and just paying a single person to read the courts judgement and restore the account.
Actually, now I realise this is optimal for FB. They want to kick paedos and contract killers off the platform. Or maybe they are cool with the CK community but know that governments are not, so if their algo declares even the slightest chance you’re a CK they boot you off — they already have lots of users. You object because you’re not a CK, or you are and want to swap tips and inside jokes with other members of the community, so you sue and win.
Now, when you get fingered for a killing you negotiated on the platform, FB can say, “hey, the courts made us let stephenlindauer back on.”
For this particular business model where you are basically an ad company so you don't really care what ad viewers want to tell you because it's not from them that the money comes from. But when you actually offer a paid service, the dynamics is completely different. I can name several companies with stellar customer support.
I've been "engaging" with Facebook to delete my account, and it does feel awfully like I'm talking to an LLM. We entered a circular argument with me asking exactly why I needed a new email address to delete my account, and Facebook telling me that I hadn't provided them a new email address.
Like the OP I'll be sending a complaint to the government, in my case, Australia's Privacy Commissioner. I'm not super optimistic about whether they will do anything, having dealt with them in the past, but I'm still giving it a shot.
The best way to do business is with FB is, sadly, through various overseas spam companies. They get results, the prices are reasonable, and you never have to worry about having an ad account being banned because they'll just make more for you.
If you try to do it any sort of legit way, and you aren't spending $100k/mo, FB simply does not want to talk to you and does not care. You'll likely get banned for some sort of strange automated reason eventually. Doesn't matter how innocuous your ads or messaging are. And if a CC transaction ever gets denied for some reason—you're toast.
I pretty much never use Facebook, but a while back I got restricted front the marketplace after listing a car. A boring list detailing the state of a car has to be the least offensive thing possible, so I assume some bot had an aneurism, but my appeals got denied and I was never able to find out what I supposedly did wrong. Something like this does sound like a good middle finger to them had I actually had any interest in getting it back.
I recently wrote an Ask HN post[1] about obtaining my trademarked X & YouTube handles (neither is registered by a user/both are being “protected” from being registered by the respective platforms).
Since 2022 I’ve worked with legal/support teams and successfully climes my trademarked handle/username from:
Meta (IG & Threads)
Microsoft (GitHub)
Reddit
TikTok
Amazon (Twitch)
Kick
Similarly, no user had registered my trademarked name on those platforms either, but I couldn’t register it because they were all “protecting” the name/brand from being registered.
Of note, Meta’s legal team was the most responsive and transferred me the accounts within 24 hours of sending my Trademark Notice, following a couple back and forth email confirmations.
Unlike every other platform a Discord user did in fact register my trademark and is holding himself out as “CEO of {trademark}” with the “TM” trademark emoji following the trademark. After authenticating me as the owner of the trademark Discord’s legal team concluded they could not determine who the actual owner was and informed me I would have to sue the user and give them a copy of the Court Order. Really bizarre they would throw their user under the bus, not consider I could also name them a defendant, and that Discord was confused as to the owner of the trademark meets the legal burden of proving trademark infringement (likelihood of confusion standard).
I detailed my frustration in the post of not being able to actually speak to a human at X or YouTube, which would no doubt immediately resolve my requests like every other platform. I even noted in a comment the likelihood I’d have to file lawsuits to actually speak to a human which I believe would result in an immediate resolution/settlement.
Perhaps I will sue X, YouTube and discord, but I really shouldn’t have too and these companies should pay damages when a customer can show no human support was ever given.
If you sue them, what kind of tort is it? I wouldn't think these sites are under any obligation to give you the name, as long as they aren't assisting someone else to use your name?
In my case I would file 2 claims: 1) trademark infringement, and 2) trademark dilution. However, I’ll take a look at these cases and see what claims they filed and maybe supplement if anything applies.
Trademark infringement typically requires “likelihood of confusion”, except where the trademark is famous then there can be trademark dilution even when there is no “likelihood of confusion.”
My trademark is famous, and it’s evidenced by the fact that YouTube and X (and all the other platforms) reserved and protected my trademarked name from being registered and used.
The legal argument would be these platforms are infringing by reserving the name and diluting the famous trademark by not allowing the trademarked account to exist on their platforms.
YouTube and X don’t want to be in Court explaining why they reserve trademarked names and don’t release them to the trademark owner, so it’s just a matter of getting a human involved to get it resolved.
How are you detecting the reservation? I have a couple of trademark names and on some platforms there are no users with those names, yet they won't allow registration. Is that the trademark reservation at work? Or are there other reasons the registration would be blocked? (assuming the trademarks are very normal and not something suitable for censorship)
Each platform has their own rules for names, off the top of my head I don’t think X will allow registration of 4 (maybe 3) characters or less any longer, even if it’s available. So without prying I couldn’t give you my opinion about your mark(s).
In the case of X, I can use wayback machine and show the username did exist for a month when the platform launched (2006 I think) and then was removed from that point to the present. YouTube handles are a new feature only about a year old, and I have been trying to register it from day 1, so I have personal knowledge the handle has never existed, and they also prevent registration of any variations @{trademark}001.
I also have evidence that the other major platforms (Meta/Instagram/Threads, GitHub, Reddit, Twitch, TikTok, etc…) were reserving this trademark and released it to me upon showing I’m the trademark owner.
It’s strong enough to bring a civil lawsuit where the standard is “more likely than not” anyway. Again I doubt they’d want any employee of consequence being deposed under oath and testifying why they reserved it and refuse to turn it over to the trademark owner as many others have done.
What other remedy do you have when google/facebook/etc corp removes your business account? Facebook/Google are basically monopolies, and they sell their services for businesses.
This isn't removing you for breaking TOS, this is just mistakes that cant get a remedy because there is no customer support.
If Social media companies want to sell business services, you paid for a service, a TOS doesnt remove legal obligations and doesnt overrule state/federal law.
So people turning to their state AG and courts, makes sense.
I know I'm dealing with a small company if their only web presence is Meta.
A larger company with normal risk mitigation policies would not take that chance.
So it's sort of self-selecting that only a company that's okay with having small claims court be there remedy would use Meta.
I had an very active artist page as a musician in several bands and projects for years. Many videos and photos and posters that I stupidly either didn't back up anywhere else, or it was scattered amongst other pages or hard drives. One day, woke up and it was all gone, the page was not there or any trace of it. I tried to find out what happened and never could and eventually gave up.
In case someone from Meta is reading this, sharing posts through facebook JS API is broken since yesterday, it redirects to https://www.facebook.com/share_channel/
Doesn't meta require new users to show a copy of their ID and a photo or video of them holding it near their face? Shouldn't that be enough rigor to recover a lost account? Perhaps with a credit card purchase that is also in your name?
After failing to add my new credit card to my business Instagram account - it's locked me out. The "request review" form doesn't work on their page. Fun times. I'm literally trying to give them money.
fairshake realized that AT&T TOS had some protections against suits + mass claims, but did allow individual arbitration; and AT&T pays an arbitration fee for every case that is filed
It isn't meta's fault the system is set up to incentivize this behavior, and it isn't wrong of them to do what is in their best interest.
Now that we've discovered the loophole just legislate it closed.
1. make the loser pay court fees or arbitration fines
2a. the court fees grow by some percentage with each loss over the last year. lose 1, pay 1x; lose 100 pay 10x etc
2b. the court fees are proportional to the losers net worth or capital
I like proportional fines the best since things like speeding or parking tickets can be ruinous to one car while the next won't even spare a thought for the cost of it. We should all feel the weight of the law equally.
> make the loser pay court fees or arbitration fines
The big problem with that in the US is that many complaints that much of the rest of the world handles by having some government agency deal with them are handled in the US by the complainant having to sue in civil court.
This would discourage many people with legitimate complaints from suing unless they have an open and shut case.
I’m young enough that I never had reason to create a Facebook account (my friends never socialized on it), until a couple days ago—I wanted to buy something on Facebook marketplace. I thought, this is how Facebook stays relevant while creating my account. Of course, in order to prove me wrong, my account was instantly suspended. I was asked to provide a verification selfie, which I did, but I haven’t heard back.
It’s amusing in a depressing way that these anti-bot measures hit so many people.
I'm surprised that someone had trouble serving a subpoena on Facebook. Looking up "Meta" in California Corporation Search brings up everything with "Metal" in it, which is a hassle. Their actual company name is "Meta Platforms, Incorporated". Search for "Meta Platforms" here.[1] California company registration #2711108.
Subpoenas are sent, using a process server, to their registered agent, which is Corporation Service Company in Sacramento, a business which exists to receive subpoenas for other companies. And, conveniently, there are process serving companies with offices in the same building, and you can find them by searching for the address of CSC and "process server", then ignoring the spam results.
Most small claims court web sites explain all this.
[1] https://bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov/search/business